La imagen de la ciudad de Estambul, entre realidad, metáfora y sueño

Abstract

This article aims to show how it is possible to transform a real urban space into a metaphor, an oneiric space, or a simple literary image. Spanish and Latin American contemporary writers and poets, linked to a major literary tradition, set their works in Istanbul because of its history, its charming natural landscapes, its complicated urban layout, and its ethnic, cultural, and religious mixing. Their strategies oscillate between the descriptions of the city's rivers, palaces, sunsets, local people, and neighborhoods in realistic terms and the capacity to create an imaginary and metaphoric city that has no relationship with the historical place most tourists visit every year. The Turkish city has achieved a special renown in recent decades in Spanish and Latin American literature due to the novels, short stories, and poems written by authors whose purpose is to involve their readers in an irrational atmosphere made of dreams, parallel realities, and imagined spaces.